Intersecting Minds: Education, Business and Technology at the North Carolina State Jenkins Graduate School of Management
Oslo Recap
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What a weekend. Although our trip was short (<48 hours), we certainly made the most of it. On Friday afternoon, we left our dormitory and headed for Nordhavn and the boarding area. When we arrived, we realized we would be traveling in style. The boat was absolutely massive, a top notch cruise liner. After boarding around 3:30, we took a trip to the top deck, where I snapped some pictures of the CPH skyline before we left. Here’s my favorite:
Nice evening
You can see from the picture the other boat in the dock and how bit it was. And we were looking down on it from the top deck by a good ways. Following a quick tour of the boat, we headed to a brief informational meeting about the cruise liner from 4:00-5:00. Then we had a formal dinner featuring ad libitum wine and an amazing array of food (caviar, salad, steak, potatoes… you get the idea).
It was fantastic to get an opportunity to catch up with many people who I hadn’t seen since Introduction Week. After the initial burst of meeting a couple hundred people, it became very difficult to keep track of everyone, so this was a great chance to reconnect with many friends. Speaking of people, another highlight of the trip was meeting my roommates in the ship room. I shared a cabin with three other guys, one American, one German, and one Swiss. Talk about a good group of guys, we managed to have a great time and not get in the way of each other too much despite the small size of the room. Check this picture out:
Tight spaces
And yea, that’s a room for 4 people, not two. Those are fold out beds on either side of the picture frame. Whew. But it didn’t really matter too much because we didn’t spend hardly any time in the room. Between the boat tour, the dinner, and the disco party that followed we only had a few hours of sleep on Friday night.
The next morning, we woke up around 8:30 am and headed downstairs for an all you can eat breakfast buffet. The food definitely hit the spot, and we were ready to go tour Oslo. However, with several hundred young tourists headed out, I realized it would be virtually impossible to move quickly enough in the 6 hours given to us to really see much. So I grabbed one of my friends, Carolina (love that name), and said, “Look, the two of us should head out to the Sculpture Garden. It will be so much faster and easier to get around if we split up.” Needless to say, she agreed, and off we went.
Over the rest of the morning and afternoon, we managed the following:
- Walk to the Vigeland Sculpture Park
- Walk back through the downtown area admiring the amazing Oslo architecture and hilly countryside
- Stop for lunch at Bagel/Juice to spend $15 for a bagel sandwich
- See the changing of the guard at the Parliament Building
- Catch the Metro to the other side of the city
- Toured the Munch Museum, home of one of the most famous paintings in the world: The Scream
- Managed to get slightly lost on the way back, but found our way again
Needless to say, it was an action-packed 6 hours. Here are a few photo highlights:
Awesome travel companion
Favorite Munch: The Kiss
Second favorite Munch: The Murderer
Here are a few other impressions from Oslo:
- The Norwegians seemed a little more friendly to us than the Danes typically are. I’m not sure if this is because the Norwegians are generally a little less reserved than their counterparts, or if it was simply a function of Carolina and I being a traveling duo, instead of a huge group. But needless to say, people were very friendly to us, offering help and directions on the street and in Bagel/Juice.
- Oslo was a more unique city than i was expecting, and that was a good thing. The hills surrounding the downtown area were gorgeous. The architecture was superb, and the large parks and walking streets really made the city seem peaceful and welcoming. Unfortunately, there were no bike lanes though, but I can understand that to an extent considering how much more hilly Oslo is than Copenhagen.
- Six hours wasn’t nearly enough to see everything. Even though we had an action packed day, there was still soooo much more to see. If only I had my snowboard, I would have definitely planned a trip up to the mountains.
After our day touring the city, we headed back to the boat. As the sun was setting, myself and one of my roommates headed out to the hot tubs on the back of the boat to check the skyline before we headed out. This is what we were greeted with (and unfortunately the picture really doesn’t do it justice):
View from the hot tub
Needless to say, we had another great dinner and party on the way back to Copenhagen that night. All in all, it was a fantastic trip, and Oslo is definitely on the list of places I want to come back to the next time I’m in Europe.
Taking Control of My Education
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A lot of my friends back at home have been asking me how classes are going out here, and how it compares to education back in the States. I’ve already talked about the specifics of the Danish system (100% finals, non-compulsory lectures, etc.). But I wanted to expand a little bit on how that system is affecting my study habits and interests here in Denmark vis-a-vis my experiences at NC State.
In all honesty, I spent the first several weeks here not really doing a whole lot. My finals were far in the future, the classes were kind of all over the place, and there wasn’t any real structure to follow. I wasn’t really doing a great job of adjusting to my new environment, and as a result, I began feeling really unsatisfied with my academic experience here. Where was the structure? Where were the assignments? At the end of the day, I just wasn’t really sure how much I was learning, and that became increasingly frustrating to me.
After going through a period 0f self-reflection and talking to friends and family back home, I realized I needed to adjust my approach. In the United States, I was going to learn whether I wanted to or not. The courses demanded it. Here, I needed to take much more control over my educational experience. If I didn’t want to learn, I wasn’t going to learn (and my grades would almost certainly suffer as a result). So over the last several days and weeks, I’ve begun to refocus myself.
Now, I set aside time each day to go to the library and teach myself the material I find interesting. Instead of relying on teachers and syllabuses to tell me what to study each day, I set my own schedule and pick the topics that are grabbing my interest. For example, there’s a reason I chose finance as a supplementary concentration to supply chain. Oddly enough, I like finance. And now I set aside several hours each day to pore over valuation problems, options analysis, and risk management techniques.
The same is true for my other courses here. I’ve spent less time studying for my Logistics class, but that’s because a lot of that material has been covered in other courses and experiences I’ve had in the States. Rather than bog myself down in reviewing material I already know, I’m trying to learn new material that will add to my skill set.
Unsurprisingly, this process has been very rewarding for me. I wake up and I find that I’m excited to head off to school because I know I’ll be learning what I want to learn, and writing about topics that truly interest me. It has taken some time to find my academic groove here, but now that I have, I’m not sure if I would trade it for the more structured American approach. Much like everything else here, it’s a cultural trade-off, and one that I’m learning to appreciate as we move closer to our final exams.
Light Posting this Week
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All of a sudden it’s late October, and school has finally started to bear down on us here at CBS. Most of my time this week will be spent catching up on school work, reading, cases and starting to work on my final projects.
In the meantime, here’s three business/economics/finance blogs that I read for analysis on global events:
Calculated Risk: Focuses primarily on real estate and the mortgage crisis. One of the primary reasons I’m still relatively pessimistic on the economy.
Naked Capitalism: Awesome financial analysis of global events
The Baseline Scenario: Simon Johnson is considered one of the top minds in macroeconomics/finance and his writing here is top notch
In the meantime, it’s time for me to hit the books!
Copenhagen Update
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I haven’t really had much to blog about regarding my Study Abroad experience since Culture Night. It’s Week 42, our break week, meaning there are no courses and most of the students head out of town. Instead of taking a trip though, I decided to use this opportunity to catch up on some school work and just enjoy what has been some beautiful, albeit cold weather this week.
It’s pretty surreal to think that I’ve been here for two months now. This is by far the longest amount of time I’ve been out of the United States, and while I’ve gone through some periods of homesickness, I feel good about my living situation here. What I wrote about not owning a car or a television holds even more true now. I enjoy having the extra time in my day to grocery shop for fresh produce, meats and breads. I enjoy using my bike to commute around the city.
Two days ago, I went for a 16 km ride (~10 miles) around the downtown area, from my locale in Frederiksberg up to Nørrebro, then easat across the canal to Nørreport, turning south to Kongens and downtown, then across another canal to Christianshavn and finally back to Rådhuspladsen and home. Copenhagen really does an amazing job of tying together 17th and 18th century aesthetics and style with 21st century architecture. The city can seem quaint yet modern all at the same time. It’s really quite charming. Here’s one of my favorite photos from the top of the Round Tower featuring some of the city’s skyline:
View from the top of the Round Tower
There aren’t really any skyscrapers in Copenhagen. The effect is to highlight the towers you see in the distance that belong to old castles and government buildings from the 18th and 19th centuries. The lack of tall buildings is really similar to Washington DC where the focus is put on the Capitol Building and the monuments instead of the power of the skyline.
And way in the distance, even though you can’t really see it from the picture, massive windmills generate much of the power for the city. Since Copenhagen sits right next to the ocean, there is plenty of wind to power the turbines that create clean, renewable energy. The combination of the old and new – castles and cutting edge architecture; Metro and museums – makes Copenhagen a really unique place and wonderful place to live.
More on Classes and Exams
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One of the more difficult adjustments I’ve had to make at CBS has been dealing with the final exam as 100% of the grade policy. For a class like Corporate Finance, where the exam will cover most, if not all of the material presented in the readings and lectures, this is fine. We as students know what to study and where we need to focus, and then we just have to perform at exam time.
But for my other three classes, this is a much trickier proposition. Both International Logistics and Strategic Risk Management require individual 15-page papers. The topics of the paper are pretty much left up to us, as long as they have something to do with Logistics or SRM, respectively. There’s very little in the way of guidelines and structure. As a result, going to class and doing the readings for these classes is truly optional, and when I do the readings, I interpret every word through the prism of whether or not that particular article or chapter in the text will help me write my final.
This approach is a complete 180 from how we learn and cover material at NC State. Almost every class has a variety of projects that receive grades, whether those are midterm exams, presentations or other assignments. The courses are much more structured, and students know from the first day what exactly will be expected of them throughout the semester. That’s not necessarily the case in Copenhagen. For example, here is an excerpt from an e-mail we received from the administrative office regarding our finals:
Automatic Exam Enrollment Exam enrollment is done automatically in the courses you have in your course enrolment status. Don’t panic if you do not see all your courses in the exam enrolment status at this point. However, please contact the course secretary if your courses do not show in your exam enrollment status at the latest two weeks before the exam is set to take place. Before then – don’t worry.
If we had to wait until two weeks before the exam date to figure out when, where, and how the exam would go down, I know many people back at home who would be freaking out.
So it will be up to me to take more control of my schedule here and navigate the assignments the Professors have laid out for us. Fortunately, I already have some interesting ideas for my Logistics and SRM exam papers, and I feel like I’m up to the challenge. While this can be a frustrating experience at times, it’s much more similar to a non-academic environment. In business, managers are expected to be pro-active and to not simply wait for direction from upper management.
Class Overview
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Now that I’m a little more than a week into classes, and I’ve had at least one lecture for each course, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what my schedule looks like:
Corporate Finance: Judging from the syllabus this class will be a lot of review of topics covered in my Intro to Finance course from last semester, but with more depth and advanced concepts thrown in. There will be an individual final exam with problem solving and potentially a short essay or two.
Strategic Risk Management: This looks like one of the more interesting classes I’ll be taking. While the class will have a heavy emphasis on managing risk from a financial perspective, there will also be an emphasis on holistic risk management from other threats (i.e. environmental, political, economic, etc…). There will be an individual research paper addressing how a specific organization manages risk as well as an oral defense of the arguments presented in that paper.
International Logistics Management: A requirement for my Supply Chain concentration, this class will discuss both basic SCM concepts as well as more advanced theories and applications of logistics management. The course also requires a 15-page research paper, but is more of a pure research paper looking at Logistics management from either a theoretical or practical perspective. We will be proposing a research question, and then attempting to answer it.
Innovation Leadership: This class was my wildcard. It’s not required for either SCM or Finance, but it looked interesting, and the class already has a heavy focus on networking as a driver for moving innovative ideas to exploitation on the market. For the final, we will be working in teams of 4-5 to develop an entrepreneurial business plan relating to clean energy innovation.
Unlike American universities, at Copenhagen Business School, the final exams are 100% of the grade. There is no homework, no compulsory attendance, and no midterms. Needless to say, this is quite a paradigm shift from how I usually approach school. Every note I take or word I read is now seen through the prism of the final. Does this piece of information relate to what I need to do? If yes, write it down or capture that memory. If no, discard.
It will be very interesting to see how this dynamic plays out over the course of the semester and how it affects my work. Studying will definitely be a topic I return to in future blog posts. But for now, I have to head to the library to do some more reading!
Tags: Copenhagen Business School, Courses, Exams, Studies
An American Abroad
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For most of my life, I have thought to myself, “I am a very lucky person. I was born in the United States. I live in the most prosperous, influential, and opportunistic country on Earth. The United States is a country that others aspire to, and I wouldn’t want to live or come from anywhere else.”
I imagine I’m not the only person from America who feels that way. I think Americans for the most part are very proud of many aspects of their country if not all of it. If you were born and raised in the US, there’s a lot of reasons to adhere to that line of thought. We are the world’s most powerful democracy, a tolerant and wealthy nation that commands respect and projects influence around the world.
And like many Americans who haven’t traveled abroad, I hadn’t really had that viewpoint challenged. After spending more than 15 days here already, I’m beginning to realize that maybe I had it just a bit wrong. I am indeed very lucky to have been born in America, and to live there now, but the people from all these other countries – South Korea, Brazil, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Thailand, Hong Kong, Israel, Bulgaria, Sweden, and of course Denmark – are pretty lucky too.
Many of them love their countries just as much as I love America, and they are doing things just fine their way, thank you very much. It’s been an eye opening experience for me to realize that. We do some things really well in America, for which we should be proud. But there are other things, and I’m not just talking about the big issues like our obsession with guns, or our attitude towards climate change, but also the everyday aspects of a person’s livelihood
For example, late Monday night around 9:30, I wandered down our hall because I heard the noise of several people talking and laughing. When I arrived at the scene, there were about a dozen Italians eating dinner, drinking wine and soda and socializing with each other. They invited me in to eat with them, and of course I accepted despite the fact that I had eaten dinner just a few hours earlier. The food was excellent and the people were very welcoming. It was a definite contrast to how we would do a Monday evening dinner in America.
I know I’m coming about this in a bit of a round about way, but I hope my message is getting through. I suppose I’m beginning to think about America in a more humble fashion, and trying to learn as much as I can about how people from other countries live their lives.
The fun part to think about is that while I’ve spent a lot of time with people from all over the world, I still haven’t really scratched the surface of Danish culture. And the Danes generally live happier lives, something that I hope to keep learning more about in the coming weeks.
First Day of Class
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It’s that time of year again. After the end of an amazing introduction week capped by a truly international formal dinner on Saturday night, we are ready for the first week of classes. As I write this, I’m sitting inside Dalgas Have, one of the four buildings I mentioned in my last post. In a little less than 45 minutes I’ll be heading to my first lesson here at CBS.
The classes I’m taking this semester are:
- Corporate Finance
- Strategic Risk Management (Global Derivatives)
- International Logistics Management
- Innovation Leadership
Earlier today, I stopped by the bookstore in Solberg Plads to buy my first round of textbooks. Needless to say, the Strategic Risk Management class looks like it’s going to be the true beast of the group. The material looks difficult, and even worse, the class is held in seven sessions: four 3-hour blocks on Fridays and three 6-hour blocks on Saturdays. Yuck. But I do know the class will be worth it. I’ve always wanted to understand the financial markets and the economic crisis better, and this class will be a key to that knowledge.
I’m also excited for my other classes, Corp. Finance and Logistics Management because they fit into my two concentration areas, and Innovation Leadership because it should help me learn how to think more like an entrepreneur.
As an added bonus today, I finally got my cell phone topped up and ready to work. Unlike the US, the Danish cell phones that the students use here have a pay as you go policy. I’m hoping I can make the $100 I spent today last at least a couple months. I really haven’t been using my phone much here because I really haven’t needed to. With so many planned activities during the first two weeks, we all knew where we were going and where we’d be. But now that classes have started, having a cell phone has become necessary again. Those two weeks of freedom from calling/texting sure were nice though.
Biking Copenhagen
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I’ve been meaning to write this post for almost a day now, but I’ve barely had time to sit, let alone blog. On Saturday, I managed to complete a real round of grocery shopping, buy a new cell phone for only $50, and I picked up a used bike as well. The bike has been nothing short of great, and I’m learning why so many Copenhageners use them to get around.
First of all, the city has built large bike lanes on every major road and most side streets. These lanes are easily wide enough for 2 bikes to ride side by side. The city is also flat, and it’s cool enough temperature-wise to make riding a comfortable experience. Riding is also a great form of exercise, and it explains in part why Danish obesity rates are nearly 2.5 times less than their American counterparts, (~11% in Denmark vs 26% in the United States).
Last night, three of us pedaled from our dorm to Christiania to catch a reggae concert. We didn’t bring a map, figuring we could just ask the locals along the way for directions. While we ended up making several wrong turns, it didn’t really matter because the three of us were so captivated by the ride and the city. We rode down new streets and ended up by these large castles downtown before finally heading in the right direction and making our destination.
This week is another busy week of orientation. 500+ more exchange students arrived this weekend, so we’ll have another huge round of names and faces to learn while also trying to get our class schedules figured out, books purchased, and getting around.
